


Retrospection

by AnneMcSommers



Series: Fix It Arc [3]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Child Abuse, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Queliot Week, Suicide Attempt, This is very dark the next part is better I promise, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29230968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnneMcSommers/pseuds/AnneMcSommers
Summary: Day 5: Not Everything Can be MendedQuentin faces his worst memories for a shot of getting out of the underworld.  This will make infinitely more sense if you read the last part.
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Series: Fix It Arc [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2024135
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	Retrospection

Quentin stepped through the door and into a memory. 

He was 4, and he had just broken his mother’s favorite ashtray. He remembered why he did it now. He had heard some older kids at school talking about how smoking would kill you, and he was afraid. Afraid his mother was going to die, and he thought that if he broke the ashtray she wouldn't be able to smoke anymore. Except it hadn’t worked. His mother was furious with him, screaming at him about how he broke things, and for the first time in his life he was afraid of his mother. 

It wouldn’t be the last time either, but when his Father finally arrived home Quentin was sobbing. A bruise was forming where his mother was squeezing his forearm far too hard while she screamed in his face, and his pants were wet from fear. 

Quentin never liked to think about this day. Tthe way his Dad and Mom fought, and his mother stormed out. That was also a first, but by far not the last. He stood frozen in fear, and his father looked gut-punched when Quentin flinched away from his hand as he reached out to comfort his son. 

He remembered what came next, how his father cleaned him up, and then drove him to the hospital after finding his arm had swollen so much it might be broken. It wasn’t, but this was the beginning of the end of his family, and deep down, why he had always felt responsible for his parents’ divorce. They had never fought before this, and it was all his fault. 

The next memory was of his mother leaving, and it was a short one. He got off the bus that day and saw his mother loading suitcases into an unfamiliar car. She barely looked at him as she got in the passenger’s seat and the car drove off. It was only the look on his father’s face that made him realize something was wrong. He remembered the guilty feeling he had when his father said she wasn’t coming back. He felt guilty because he wasn’t sad, he was relieved. 

After that they were smaller, his mother being disappointed, his father not understanding, then the bleakness, and then he was 16. Sitting in the kitchen with Jules and his Dad. All of them crying as Julia told his Dad what Quentin had told her, that he had wanted to die. Then it was the hospital, then the hospital again, and the day with the pills. The day his dad saw him with the razor, and called his mother because he was too shaken to drive their son to get help. 

His mother screaming at him on the way to the hospital, how his attention seeking had cost her a client. The sting of her palm on his face. His Dad filing the restraining order against her. The hospital again, and then he was at Brakebills. 

After that they started coming out of order, building threads of terrible, all the things he had ever done wrong in his relationships with others spread out like a story that only showed the dark days. 

It was the day with Alice and the Niffin, then the day she died, and letting her go, and finally how angry she was to come back. Even worse somehow after she started sleeping with him again, but was still cold, inhuman, treating him like little more than a sex doll rather than the man she had once loved. Her betrayal of the keys was barely a sting by comparison.

Then it was his dad, the cancer, the remission, telling him about magic coming back, and finding out he was gone too late to really mourn. Finding out his Mother still thought of him as little more than the child who broke things. Julia hating him, cursing him, and then not being Julia anymore. Like Alice it was the indifference that was the worst, when Julia was ignoring him, watching the monster hurt him, and never stepping in, just letting it all happen. 

But the worst, the worst were the last two. First it was sitting int the palace throne room listening to Eliot tell him it wasn’t really them and even though he knew it was a lie, it hurt. That in the end Eliot had lived a lifetime with him, and didn’t feel enough for him to even give it a shot again.

Magic dying, the bleakness returning, the quest, agreeing to the dungeon. And then they were at the seam, and it was gray. Like the world had felt in the months without magic and then without Eliot had bled the color from this world, and then the mirror broke. He could fix it, he wanted to fix it, he could save them all. And he did, and he started to run, but then he hesitated. The moment he realized all he had to do was stop running and it would all be over, all the pain, all the anguish, no one would even really care than much, and all he had to do was stay still. And he did. 

He lay on the floor, feeling the weight of a thousand disappointments pressing down into his chest, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a door appear and now he knew. He knew what the challenge was. Why most people didn’t make it out, because the idea of getting up, of opening that door and facing it all again was overwhelming. Even worse, the idea he would try and open it and find it locked, how would he ever move on if it were locked. He knew in that moment that even if he got out, he wouldn’t be the same, that despite his discipline that not everything can be mended. 

So he laid there gasping, taking all his effort just to keep breathing and he stared at the door.

**Author's Note:**

> So I know this is SUPER late, I actually had it done in time, but I over comitted on a few challenges and I am still backlogged in the editing department.


End file.
